One day in April 2002, the managing editor of what was about to become The New York Sun, Ira Stoll, sat down with a reporter for the paper, Ben Smith, for an interview with New York's new mayor. When conversation turned to the proposed Second Avenue subway line, Mr. Stoll inquired whether the city might sell the subways to a private entrepreneur. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, responded with the question, "What are you smoking?"
...Mr. Bloomberg had been skeptical at the start, but in 2004, he stopped by the offices of the Sun to proclaim April 16 "New York Sun Day" in New York City. Yesterday, he greeted the news of the paper's decision to cease publication with a statement that called the paper's writers "smart, thoughtful, provocative — and sometimes even courageous." Said the mayor: "In a City saturated with news coverage and commentary, The Sun shone brightly, though too briefly."
(The Saloon wishes the best of luck to the staff of the New York Sun. You will be missed -Roland)
The House's failure to pass a $700 billion bailout package Monday not only held back billions for Wall Street, but also was a major blow to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign.
The Republican presidential nominee raised the stakes for himself last week when he suspended his campaign and returned to Washington for negotiations over a solution to the financial crisis.
A number of Republican House members and staff, along with others who are plugged in, are telling me that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will come back with a new bill that includes all the left-wing stuff that was scrubbed from the bill that was defeated today in the House.
As this scenario goes, the House Democrats need 218 votes, and they have to pick up a number of black and Hispanic House members who jumped ship because the Wall Street provisions, in their view, were too benign. So things like the bankruptcy judges setting mortgage terms and rates, the ACORN slush-fund spending, the union proxy for corporate boards, stricter limits on executive compensation, and much larger equity ownership of selling banks through warrants will all find itself back in the new bill. Of course, this scenario will lose more Republican votes. But insiders tell me President Bush will take Secretary Paulson’s advice and sign that kind of legislation.
While many of the talking heads and pundits on TV have been providing calming words of reassurance about proposed federal intervention in the financial system, analyst Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital has been accurately warning for years about a financial meltdown and says that the worst, if Congress eventually passes the “bailout” bill, is yet to come.
Many commentators, Schiff said, are telling people that if the bailout doesn’t go forward, there will be an economic crisis. However, “if we do it, there will be a bigger crisis,” he predicts...“The politicians want to make believe we can avoid paying the piper if we pass these bailouts,” he said. “It’s just not true. It’s going to collapse the currency. It’s going to make a worse economic crisis because the money they’re printing is not going to buy anything.”
You know the economy has definitely reached crisis level when Playboy billionaire Hugh Hefner is being told to tighten his purse strings or face bankruptcy.
"Despite her acting being the subject of much criticism, Natalie Wood still managed to star in many high profile movies – West Side Story and Rebel Without A Cause to name a couple. Wood also received Oscar, Bafta, and Golden Globe nominations during her movie career. But alas, it was to be cut short when she died of accidental drowning at the age of 43 in 1981 whilst doing location work for Brainstorm. The film was released two years after Wood’s death, with a missing scene as it was incomplete. Critics liked it, but the film failed at the box office."
Kenneth Branagh is negotiating to direct "Thor," the next Marvel Comics property that will be turned into a live-action film by Marvel Studios. Pic will be released in 2010.
Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige's choice of Branagh is surprising, as Branagh hasn't really directed an action-heavy film since his debut on "Henry V," a bloody telling of the British king's conquest of France.
Whether it was murder or suicide is beside the point: Wall Street as it has operated for the past 75 years has been obliterated in a matter of weeks. And witnessing this violent death in broad daylight has traumatized investors everywhere.
The Wall Street domino has toppled just about everything in sight: U.S. stocks large and small, within the financial industry and outside of it; foreign stocks; oil and other commodities; real-estate investment trusts; formerly booming emerging markets like India and China. Even gold, although it has inched up lately, has lost 10% from its highs earlier this year. Not even cash seems entirely safe, as money-market funds barely averted a "run on the bank."
Of all the dominos that have tipped over, the most psychologically damaging collapse was the last: the very notion of diversification itself.
FTA-"The credit crisis is dominating headlines and hammering financial stocks, causing once seemingly invincible Wall Street investment houses to quake and major money center banks to quiver. But is the problem really filtering down to Main Street and the countless small businesses that provide the jobs that fuel the economy?
The nation's top economic leaders repeatedly raised the specter of a Main Street meltdown on Capitol Hill this week to justify a $700 billion bailout for major financial institutions. But the message is pretty much ringing hollow on Main Street, where rising prices and the economic slowdown outweigh credit concerns, according to the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB)."
The credit Markets are fine. Bush and Pelosi's pals on Wall Street are not- screw their bailout package.-Riley
British candy maker Cadbury said Monday it is recalling 11 types of Chinese-made chocolates after tests found they contained the industrial chemical melamine...Four infants have died and some 54,000 have developed kidney stones or other illnesses after drinking baby formula contaminated with the substance, which is used to make plastics.
A man who police said broke into a home with the intention of sexually assault a 17-year-old girl in her bedroom died early Sunday morning after a struggle with the girl's father...Officers said they found Robert McNally, 64, on the floor with his arm around the neck of Meyers, struggling to hold him down.
Indianapolis police Sgt. Matt Mount said Meyers had come into the home naked, except for a mask and latex gloves..."He had rope, had a knife, had condoms, had a gag,"
Convicted political fixer Antoin ''Tony'' Rezko has been quietly visiting Chicago's federal courthouse, setting off speculation that he may be spilling secrets to prosecutors in return for a lenient sentence...Two attorneys said Monday they and other lawyers have been contacted by prosecutors seeking to check information that only Rezko could have told them. Both attorneys spoke only on condition of anonymity, saying prosecutors have sought to keep such matters secret as part of the grand jury investigation
With one socialist “bailout” bill (defeated) by Congress, two more are pending―both of them sponsored by Senator Barack Obama. One is the Jubilee Act, which would cancel as much as $75 billion worth of Third World debt, and the other is the Global Poverty Act, which would cost an estimated $845 billion. Total potential cost: $920 billion.
What the hell was yesterday's smiling press conference all about? Why were Hoyer, Frank, Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic Leadership smiling yesterday? Did they have any sense of their own caucus?...Pelosi said she needed political cover. A third of House Republicans ought to be enough cover. How the hell does Pelosi's bill not carry 40 percent of her caucus?
The House has defeated the $700 billion bail-out legislation for the financial industry.
More than enough members of the House had cast votes to defeat the Bush administration-pushed bill, but the vote was held open for a while, apparently as efforts were under way to persuade people to change their vote.
While the meeting in Pelosi’s office was supposed to include just Paulson and the principal negotiators – Blunt, Gregg, Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) — a substantial number of Senate Democrats were there as well.
Republicans complained that the presence of the additional Democrats was making the process more difficult; by setting up shop in Boehner’s office, Paulson was able to get some breathing room after spending hours in close quarters, where at times he was hectored by some of the Senate Democrats.
Earlier in the day Saturday, Boehner had gone before the TV cameras to say that House Republicans would not agree to a bill “that bails out Wall Street at the expense of American taxpayers.”
The world’s leading Islamic terrorist and Jew-hater was honored in New York Thursday night, dining (but presumably not wining) under the roof of Barack Obama’s chief fundraiser. This fact did not sit well with the thousands of protesters who turned out to deplore Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and to mock billionaire Hyatt hotel owner Penny Pritzker, who is the national finance chair of Obama’s presidential campaign.
A resolution was introduced in the United States House of Representatives this week condemning two United Nations committees. The non-binding resolution was introduced by Republican Thad McCotter (R-MI) and specifically condemns actions taken by the Human Rights Committee (HRC) and the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
The resolution singles out these two committees for reinterpreting hard-law treaties to include a right to abortion and trying to force sovereign states who have ratified the treaties into accepting these new interpretations.
Though neither the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights nor the CEDAW treaty mention abortion and, as stated in the Resolution, "establishes or implies a right to abortion," the Committees routinely tell governments they must change their laws protecting the unborn.
A tense standoff has developed in waters off Somalia over an Iranian merchant ship laden with a mysterious cargo that was hijacked by pirates. Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died...“We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”
Ecuadorans went to the polls Sunday to vote on a new constitution that expands the powers of President Rafael Correa and ushers his "21st century socialism," in lock step with leftist allies in Venezuela and Bolivia. Balloting began throughout the country as scheduled at 1200 GMT. Passed by a Constitutional Assembly on July 24, the new Magna Carta would strengthen the government's hold on the economy of this small nation of 13.9 million people ...
Al Gore has rightly been scolded for encouraging civil disobedience to stop global warming. But his little-noticed follow-up statement might be even more foolish — and dangerous.
When it comes to sheer crackpottery on environmental issues, no national figure can measure up to the lofty standard set by the former Tennessee senator and vice president. This is a man who is leading a caravan of humming hybrid drivers to nowhere and is willing to criminalize those who disagree with him to get there.
The Obama camp has been threatening television and radio stations to keep them from airing anti-Obama ads.
The latest target is the NRA and stations in Pennsylvania.
Earlier this week, the National Rifle Association's Political Victory Fund released a series of radio and television spots to educate gun owners and sportsmen about Barack Obama's longstanding anti-gun record. In response to the NRA-PVF ads, a clearly panicked Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are doing everything they can to hide Obama's real record by mounting a coordinated assault on the First Amendment.
They have gone to desperate and outrageous lengths to try to silence the NRA by bullying media outlets with threats of lawsuits if they run NRA-PVF's ads.
In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.
“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”
Barack Obama played the "me too" game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.
Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son's name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.
Not only was the Paulson plan fatally flawed, in the view of House conservatives, it was later revealed by the Wall Street Journal that the Democratic version of the Paulson plan, which is now more than 100 pages long, included money for the Housing Trust Fund, which has funded radical political groups like ACORN and the National Council of La Raza.
In a statement, Hensarling declared, “We must consider alternatives that would suspend capital gains taxes immediately. We have a liquidity crisis and suspending capital gains taxes would bring as much as a trillion dollars of capital sitting on the sidelines back into the market. Second, we need to suspend the mark to market accounting that has created a credit crunch dust pile for so many businesses across America.”
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